Alex Nitkin

@alexnitkin.bsky.social

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Government Finance & Accountability reporter, @IllinoisAnswers/@BetterGov. Formerly of @thedailylinechi, @trdchicago & @DNAinfoChi. Tips: Anitkin@bettergov.org

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Statement from CHA Operating Chairman Matthew Brewer regarding Mayor Johnson’s comments on the appointment of CEO Keith Pettigrew:

We followed the law, we followed the process, and seven of ten Commissioners approved the appointment of CEO Keith Pettigrew in an open meeting. The Mayor may disagree with the outcome, but rewriting the facts doesn’t change them and mischaracterizing the law does not change the actual law.

The CEO search process began in November 2024 and consisted of an outside firm conducting a search to identify the best talent in Chicago and across the nation. CHA Board members, resident leadership, and the Mayor’s office agreed to this process from the outset and even interviewed Mr. Pettigrew. Now, the Mayor is attempting to unilaterally disregard the process and put politics and cronies over the best interests of our CHA residents, and they deserve better.

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The programs “are yielding results,” Johnson’s chief of staff, Cristina Pacione-Zayas, said in an interview after Johnson’s Oct. 16 budget address.

Spending on mental health and youth employment have shown they can provide “what Chicagoans should have as entitlement, and that is safe communities. That is access to comprehensive health care. That is young people having opportunities to explore their career pathways and passions,” Pacione-Zayas said. “All of those are reasonable investments. In fact, I would argue they’re baseline investments.”

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Pierog, the chairperson of the Kane County Board, defended county leaders’ recent decision to shift an even greater share of the county’s RTA sales tax money away from transportation in favor of its jail and courts.

“They had to take money from transportation to be able to support the needs for public safety,” Pierog said in an interview with Illinois Answers Project. “Since population has increased, the need for public safety has also increased.”

“Unfortunately, we all have to take an adjustment, a fiscal adjustment, until we can find other paths,” Pierog said.

As a result of the transition to spending more on public safety, the county has paused about 19 transportation-related projects, such as safety upgrades to an accident-prone intersection, Rickert said.

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DuPage is the only county that spends its entire share of the tax on law enforcement. It taps other revenues to fund about $1.8 million annually for paratransit and $1.25 million in yearly spending on projects related to transit like sidewalk construction, county officials said.

“In every resident survey we do, we hear loud and clear residents’ No. 1 priority is public safety,” Conroy said. “If the state takes its revenue from us, there will be massive layoffs in the public safety sector, including the sheriff’s office, state’s attorney’s office, public defender and probation.”

During negotiations earlier this year about how to pull Chicago-area transit agencies from the brink of a fiscal cliff, a proposal emerged that would have redirected the collar counties’ shares of the RTA sales tax toward a sweeping new agency, dubbed the Northeast Illinois Transit Authority.

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The law raised the existing RTA sales tax to 1% in Cook County and 0.75% in the collar counties, in part to fund Pace’s administration of a regional paratransit system — but it allowed the collars to keep one-third of the revenues — as long as they spent the money on “public transportation services or facilities or to fund operating, capital, right-of-way, construction, and maintenance costs of other transportation purposes.”

The bill lacked the votes it needed to pass, according to Conroy — until three Republican legislators from DuPage County offered their support if three words were added before the spending limitations: “public safety and.”

One of those legislators was State Sen. Kirk Dillard, who is now chairman of the RTA.

“It probably was a political decision made by legislative leaders — not by me, I was just a rank-and-file member at the time,” Dillard said in an interview. “The counties had pressures, budgetary pressures."